Mobile telephone devices have become ubiquitous in our society. Unlike conventional landline telephony services, which typically operate in a home or office and are delivered via a wire or cable and enjoy a highly consistent transmission quality, mobile telephone devices are subjected to use under varying radio environments. Wireless carriers, handset manufacturers, end users, and providers of various add-on services want the call performance of mobile telephone devices to be of the highest quality. Data relating to call performance may include data related to dropped calls, failed call initiations, call set-up times, time in no service, and calls not having two-way speech. Various factors may impact call performance, including signal strength, signal quality, environmental factors (such as weather), and network congestion.
In order to arrive at predictive indicators of call performance, individuals have performed manual testing whereby a plurality of mobile telephone devices are distributed in the market and manual placement of hundreds and even thousands of calls are placed and the disposition of each is manually noted. Such a process is tedious and time consuming. In other instances, call performance may be tested in the manner of a “census” in which the calls placed to and by mobile telephones operated by consumers are monitored. However, in such a census process, the mobile telephones are already in the market place.
There is a need to deploy systems and methods designed to provide indicators (such as predictive indicators or statistical indicators) of how a mobile telephone device may perform in the hands of consumers prior to the device being distributed in the market place. Further, there is a need to perform such testing in a cost-effective and automated manner.
To accurately evaluate call performance of a mobile telephone device, there is a need to test the device under various live network scenarios. To determine an indicator of a mobile telephone device's expected call performance in the hands of a consumer, a test may be conducted in the manner of a “survey” whereby a plurality of samples of the subject mobile telephone device are used to place and receive calls from and to a variety of locations representative of the signal strength and signal quality experienced by consumer users and calls are also placed during a variety of daily time periods representing light and heavy call congestion.
For example, it may be desirable to include mobile tests, stationary tests, and in-building tests in various locations and at various times and days, so as to encompass various live network configurations. When considering live network configuration variables, it also may be desirable to test mobile telephone call performance across networks having nodes that implement various types of wireless telephony equipment, such as base-station equipment and mobile-switch equipment. Further, there is a need to perform such testing with some degree of automation to efficiently perform the testing and limit recording errors and other human errors.
Accordingly, there is a need to implement and improve test methods pertaining to mobile telephones in a manner that more accurately correlates to the actual usage experiences of mobile telephone users. These and other needs may be addressed by one or more embodiments of the present inventions.